Today is Apr 20, or "420"--a popular symbol of stoner culture. Of course, the left--in conjunction with the dirty mutant hippie drug subculture, has been working to get marijuana legalized for a number of years now. These diseases passing themselves off as human beings seem to have a response for every argument against the anti-pot laws, so rather than rehashing (no pun intended) the tired diatribes in favor of making marijuana illegal I thought I would try a different tact.

Now as you may well know, I am the founder of the Red, Yellow, and Blue Movement, dedicated to, among other things, rewriting and improving the copyright infringement laws in America. I feel they are too broad and often net the minnows along with the whales. Plagiarism is an odd duck of an offense. It falls under the umbrella of theft, yet unlike taking an automobile or money or a TV, there is no physical evidence of a crime. You can't dust an idea for prints. You can't stash it in a garage or closet or a drawer. You can't stamp your name on it. An idea is nebulous and impossible to hold, to possess. Yet an accusation of stealing one comes with a number of penalties: legal fines, damage to reputation, loss of credibility, suspension from school, expulsion, or termination from one's job. Some universities will retroactively strip a student found of plagiarism of their diploma up to a year after graduation! They don't do that to pot users. "Uh, sir, we have evidence you smoked a joint a year ago. You'll have to come with us."

Do you realize plagiarism is the most difficult crime to prove, yet the easiest accusation to make? Often the person who filed the charge needn't even appear at the hearing. You don't even have to show proof. Often said hearings, particularly at the academic level, are perfunctory and slipshod at best; the accused is presumed guilty even before (s)he comes before the board, and the charges are read with no opportunity given to the accused to make or prepare a defense beforehand. Dropping the p-bomb is about the worst thing to do to a student or newspaper staffer. I wouldn't be surprised if many of the more left-leaning professors or college newspaper editors kept a fake plagiarism charge tucked away just in case a conservative in their course or employ got a little big for their britches, they felt, and needed to be removed. Yes, I wouldn't put it past the left at all.

I'm being ridiculous, you say? Well, consider the case of one Ben Domenech, a conservative blogger who had perhaps the shortest journalism career ever. In 2006 Domenech resigned from the Washington Post's blog after a record three days for plagiarism accusations which were at least six years old. (The question of statute of limitations never came up, I suppose.) Domenech first denied, then reluctantly admitted (though I suspect he or his lawyer was bullied to make that mea culpa) to over three dozen counts of plagiarism--though he added, "Virtually every other alleged instance of plagiarism that I've seen comes from a single semester's worth of pieces that were printed under my name at my college paper, The Flat Hat, when I was 17." University of Tennessee law professor Glenn H. Reynolds suggested that Domenech was railroaded simply "because he was a conservative and he was given real estate at The Washington Post. Their goal was to find something they could use to get rid of him, and they succeeded." In other words, he was too controversial and it made him a lightning rod for liberal wrath. I know the feeling. There is, then, precedent for my concerns.

With this in mind I want to use the 420 crowds' own arguments to try to make the left see that what they are advocating is far more harmful than what I believe.

Users aren't all losers. A lot of famous people smoke pot, and look at how successful they are.

Sure. A lot of famous people have been accused of plagiarism as well. Some notable names:

• Jason Blair, former New York Times columnist
• Joseph Biden, U.S. Vice-President
• Dan Brown, novelist
• Ward Churchill, former University of Columbia professor of Ethics
• Dan Fogerty, singer
• Alex Haley, novelist
• George Harrison, singer
• Helen Keller, author and activist
• J.K. Rowling, author
• Sadam Hussein, former Iraqi President
• Lyle Menendez, accused murderer
• Vladimir Putin, Russian President

So I'm in (more or less) good company.

Using marijuana doesn't automatically make you use harder drugs.

Okay, I'll concede there's no conclusive link between pot smoking and using coke, meth, heroin or other so-called "hard drugs". Most of the evidence is ancecdotal, including my own writing about my brother Tim, a.k.a "Captain Stupid". One liberal informs me that he "smoked marijuana tons" as a teen and never felt the urge to graduate to the hard stuff. (Though I wonder if a message board post like that, if traceable, would be admissible in a court of law?) Okay, fair enough. I was (falsely) accused of plagiarizing one column, and I am now regularly told by the left that I am "immoral", that I deserve to die, and that I "crossed [the line] before" and that I'd do it again if given half a chance. So according to the left, pot is not a ticket to a life in an opium den...but one incident of plagiarism and you're branded as a criminal for life? See how knee-jerk and backwards they are?

We should legalize pot in order to cut down on street crime.

See, I never saw the merit in this idea. It's like saying, "Hey, if we legalized incest, there's be less rape." Sure, I suppose a few potheads would stop holding up liquor stores and bashing in ATMs to get cash to feed the monkey, but what about coke fiends, crackheads, meth uses, and horse jockeys? I'm sure they'll step up to fill in the gap. Are we going to legalize those too? And besides, there's always your good old-fashioned revenge killings, with no aid from drugs or booze whatsoever. Who needs it? Sort of hard to plan a decent vendetta when you're baked.

Cigarettes and alcohol kill more people than pot.

Okay, fine. Tobacco and alcohol are, in their own right, terrible vices responsible for many millions of deaths a year combined, including cancer, heart disease, automobile mishaps, and untold millions in health care costs. However, barring long sustained use of either, the body does recover. The liver can regenerate if not too heavily compromised, and so can the lungs. However, brain cells do not replenish. Pot may not be as bad as LSD, but it can remain in the fat cells and bodily fluids for some time after use, far longer than booze or cigarettes. Plagiarism, on the other hand, never killed a single person. A career, perhaps, and certainly a few good names have suffered. I can't say, however, I ever saw a police or medical show in which someone looked at a stiff and said, "He died of plagirism causes."

There's worse crimes out here. The penalties for being caught using marijuana are too strict. Why lock me up for four months for catching me with a dime bag while killers run free?

But you don't have a problem with punishing me for the last twelve years for something I didn't even do? If you're caught with marijuana or marijuana pariphanalia, yes, you go to jail. You deserve to. It could be one night, a few months, or even a year, but you eventually get out. I will never get out. I was "caught", and for it I will pay for my mistake in perpituity. I will foever be a pariah, stripped of my humanity, all my friends forsaking me, never allowed to set foot in their precious little school. There is no release, no parole, no leniency waiting for me. Not as long as this old bat is in power at AS(S)U.

Tell you what: you see fit to relaxing American plagiarism laws, Smokey, and maybe I'll look the other way while you stick that bong in your gob. Sound fair?

Well, the May issue's due out in just under two weeks...so I'd better get cracking and wrap up this arc. At over 60 pages and spanning five months ,"Up the Demi-Jon Staircase" marks the largest BDC story to date, topping previous contender the "SweetTart" arc (May-Jul 2007). Though even that behemoth will soon be overshadowed by "The Case of the Shanghaied Streetwalkers", the longest single issue, at a whopping 72 pages and a $2.98 cover price. I hope pencilling that sucker doesn't kill me. Adios for this week.

So a couple of months ago I was surfing the web looking for information on the new Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon, recently dearly departed from basic cable and now running in that fabled land of satellite TV, and this came to my attention:

It seems that (P)resident Obama and I share two things in common now: we both hail from Chicago and we are both huge fans of the webhead. For a couple of months now I have been spending many late nights downloading the original 1967 Spider-Man cartoon from YouTube and watching it in all its cheesy, recycled animation glory. Now on my ancient copmputer it takes about three hours to download a nine-minute cartoon, and sometimes my feeble connection cuts me off, or won't allow me access to certain videos. Though I watch them in no particular order, here's my list of Spider-goodies by episiode number:

1A - The Power of Dr. Octopus

1B - Sub-Zero for Spidey

2A - Where Crawls the Lizard

4A - The Sky Is Falling

* 4B - Captured by J. Jonah Jameson

5A - Never Step on a Scorpion

*6B - The Witching Hour

7A - Kilowatt Kaper

8 - Horn of the Rhino

10A - The Revenge of Dr. Magneto

10B - The Sinister Prime Minister

*11A - The Night of the Villains

*12A - Spider-Man Meets Dr. Noah Boddy

13A - Return of The Flying Dutchman

14A - The Golden Rhino

14B - Blueprint for Crime

15B - The Slippery Dr. Von Schlick

*16A - The Vulture's Prey

*19A - To Catch a Spider

20B - Trick or Treachery

*21 - The Origin of Spider-Man

*22 - King Pinned

38 - Cold Storage

40B - Conner's Reptiles

41A - Trouble with Snow

41B - Spider-Man Vs. Desparado

45B - The Devious Dr. Dumpty

48B - The Madness of Mysterio

*49 - Revolt in the Fifth Dimension

Asterisked episodes are ones my computer cut off while downlaoding, so I only saw part of them. Also, YouTube only offers the last two minutes of "Vulture's Prey", for some stupid reason. Plus the print of "Sinister Prime Minister" I found was incredibly dark and hard to make out.

These are the ones I haven't been able to download:

2B - Electro the Human Lightning Bolt

3 - The Menace of Mysterio

5B - Sands of Crime

6A - Diet of Destruction

7B - The Peril of Parafino

9A - The One-Eyed Idol

11B - Here Comes Trubble

13B - Farewell Performance

15A - The Spider and the Fly

17A - The Terrible Triumph of Dr. Octopus

17B - Magic Malice

18A - Fountain of Terror

19B - Double Identity

20A - Sting of the Scorpion

39 - To Cage a Spider

40A - The Winged Thing

43A - The Vanishing Dr. Vespasian

45A - Knight Must Fall

48A - Rhino

So if anyone can lend a fellow Spidey fan a webbed hand and send along some copies of the ones I haven't seen, or even better prints of the ones I have, they'd be much appreciated.

The "Up the Demi-Jon Staircase" arc draws to an explosive close in April, one issue away from our big golden-anniversary issue #50. So stay tuned, loyal readers.

Adios for this month.

In the true spirit of the holidays, I will forego my usual angry rants against liberals, The AS(S)U Herald, and any criticism of President-select B.H. Obama and instead wish my readers a merry Christmas.

If you wish to read one of my famous editorials, however, then preorder issue #45 of Belch Dimension Comics as a late Christmas present. In it you can read the first two chapters of a powerful three-issue arc, "Up the Demi-Jon Staircase", and my new piece, "Westside and Columbine: 10 Years Later". I offer a weighty, sober discussion of school violence and hopefully take a couple of new angles on the problem. As both a former newspaperman and a college student when, ten years ago this coming March, gunfire rocked a Jonesboro school mere blocks from AS(S)U and killed five, I feel uniquely qualified to offer thoughts on it. You don't want to miss it. That's the January ish, on sale the thirtieth.

Say, remember when you were a kid back in sixth grade and we sang all the bad parodies of famous Christmas carols? Like: It's beginning to look a lot like syphilis, All around your nose.... and Jingle bells/ Batman smells/Robin laid an egg.... Man, good times, good times.

So adios for this week, and adios for the year.